Over 43 years in the senate, Democrat Ted Kennedy has fought serial
battles on behalf of the working classfrom defending overtime pay and
workplace-safety regulations to expanding health-care availability and
penalizing discrimination. But the key to his legacy is not that he is
determined to stick up for his principles. It's that he is willing to
compromise on them.

Late in 1990, for example, Kennedy sat red-faced as House Democrat
Pat Schroeder berated him for supporting something he didn't believe
in: caps on damages for workplace discrimination. But by agreeing to
limits, Kennedy won over the handful of Republican and Southern
Democratic Senators he needed to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act
of 1991, strengthening laws that banned job discrimination. The result
was a law that protects women from sexual harassment at work and has
yielded a surge in lawsuits and tens of millions of dollars in damages
to aggrieved plaintiffs.

Kennedy was a bit of a joke when he first arrived in Washington in
1962. When John F. Kennedy ran for President, he kept his Massachusetts
Senate seat warm for his youngest sibling, placing a college buddy in it
for two years until Teddy reached the constitutionally required age of
30. But starting with a 1965 bill that did away with country-by-country
quotas for immigrants, and especially in the quarter-century since his
failed 1980 campaign for President, Kennedy, 74, has amassed a titanic
record of legislation affecting the lives of virtually every man, woman
and child in the country. With a succession of Republicans, he helped
create COBRA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, portable health care,
the Family and Medical Leave Act and more than 15 key education
programs, including the landmark 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education
Act. He also pushed through the deregulation of the airline and trucking
industries and the reduction of the voting age to 18. By the late '90s,
the liberal icon had become such a prodigious cross-aisle dealer that
Republican leaders began pressuring party colleagues not to sponsor
bills with him.

Some bipartisan efforts have backfired on Kennedy. He has complained
that he was taken in by Bush on the No Child Left Behind law because it
was inadequately funded, and Democrats are distressed that he has
collaborated with Republicans on immigration reform. Worse than that,
critics say, Kennedy's inability to stop the confirmation of Supreme
Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito show he's
losing his swat. But Kennedy still finds a way to deliver the goods for
the less advantaged. Over the next five years, more than 100,000
severely disabled children will become beneficiaries of a new $872
million program that continues government health-care payments to them
even as they move out of poverty. Kennedy and Iowa Republican Chuck
Grassley managed to slip the program into last year's budget.